Does this count as a vintage computer? I don’t think so, but I only know this community a bit. I have questions.

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Agent-Jumster88@reddit

If it has a CMOS battery and it's the clip in type, you should be able to buy a replacement online and just pop it in.

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Expensive-Function16@reddit

Man, I had one of those back in the day. I was a rebel when everyone was using Palm Pilots.

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Avery_Thorn@reddit

This has got to be one of the biggest "oh sooooo close" moments in tech.

These devices were like 95% of an iPhone 5 years before the iPhone.

But there was no cell modem.

There was no wifi. You could buy a WiFi card for it (I did), you could buy a modem for it (I did), but no cell modem.

And without a cell modem, it's... Kind of useless. It takes it from being a handheld PC to being a desk accessory.

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MorallyDeplorable@reddit

I had an older palm VIIx with a cell-based service that worked anywhere in like 2002. I got it cheap used and talked my dad into paying for the service for a month to try it out.

I dropped it after that first month, it was something stupid like 15 minutes between page loads and I wasn't able to do IRC or anything general from it. Also the reception at my house was terrible at the time and that's where I mainly wanted to use it.

It was a cool idea but the tech wasn't there yet.

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aardvarkjedi@reddit

Here’s some interesting trivia: In 2000 Palm (the company) was worth more than Apple, Nvidia, Amazon, and Starbucks combined.

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GreggAlan@reddit

Then the people in charge proceeded to make one dumb decision after another. Split the company into hardware and software divisions. Sold off Palm OS to ACCESS then paid license fees to use Palm OS 5 on Palm brand devices. *Refused* to use Palm OS 6. Started making Windows Mobile devices, one of which was the first 'modern' smartphone, before iPhone.

Then they decided to burn it all down and start over with WebOS, and a pair of rather meh smartphones. The final nail in *that* coffin was losing the deal with ACCESS to have the Palm OS emulator in WebOS, cutting everyone off from all the old apps they were still using.

Last gasp was a tablet, which I heard was rather nice, right before selling out to HP. HP looked at the numbers then mercy killed Palm and WebOS.

Somewhere in all that was a bit of bait and switch which put a pretty good ding in their reputation. Early review units of the LifeDrive were sent out with 5 gig Seagate MicroDrives that had cache. Reviews were good. But the shipping version got a 4 gig Hitachi MicroDrive *with no cache at all* and it was very slow. Reviews were... not good.

In contrast there was the Tungsten E2, which got high praise. One reviewer gave up on waiting for its battery to die after 12 hours of playing MP3 files with the screen off. There wasn't anything else available that could be a music player with that kind of runtime.

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MorallyDeplorable@reddit

WebOS lives on. It's the base OS for LG Smart TVs to this day.

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phire@reddit

Some did have cell modems, but it didn't really help them as mobile internet was both slow and expensive.

The iPhone just so happened to arrive at a time when cheaper 3G internet was becoming available (Though the 1st gen iPhone was only 2.5G, not 3G), and wifi chipsets were coming down in cost.

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tooclosetocall82@reddit

I remember walking into a cell phone store and asking about the winCE device they sold. Almost fainted when they told me the monthly fee. Definitely wasn’t accessible to normal consumers.

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emachanz@reddit

the devices themselves were expensive AF, that's why Iphones were an instant hit. I only got my pocket PCs as a kid because my uncle worked at HP at the time.

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GreggAlan@reddit

AT&T introduced paperless billing soon after they added unlimited text messaging. What prompted that was a 500+ page itemized bill for an account with a teenage girl's iPhone. Total bill for all the texts? $0.00 Apparently when unlimited texting dropped, that was all she did while awake.

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emachanz@reddit

Jezz this is so dumb, even in 3rd world countries they didnt itemize text messages or data usage as early as 2004

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chandleya@reddit

The perfect bait and switch!

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GreggAlan@reddit

I remember that iPhone was among the last to go to 3G, along with lagging way behind at getting higher resolution screens.

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phire@reddit

I remember that iPhone was among the last to go to 3G

TBH, it wasn't a big issue. As long as your cell phone provider actually supported EDGE, you were getting the same speeds as the original 3G standard.

It was mostly a network compatibility issue, and Apple didn't actually allow you to use the iphone on non-supported networks (without jailbreaking).

Also... the iphone 3G bet the first Android phone to market, so it was only really competing against dumb phones and the older generation of smartphones that everyone quickly forgot.

along with lagging way behind at getting higher resolution screens.

Not really. The iphone 4 with its Retina Display came along in June 2010. The first android phones with high DPI displays (Motorola Droid, Nexus One) had only been out for a 5-7 months.

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codeasm@reddit

I had a windows CE phone, loved it. Had bluetooth, browsed the internet a bit (oof expensive with my prepaid sim). Sadly no wifi, and my bluetooth didn't support a network connection or something. It did allow for email, agenda and contact syncing and thats what i used it for.

Usb otg, but again, windows ce needed drivers. I planned to try get wifi working but then uni borrowed me a android phone for app dev.

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bonzog@reddit

You could buy a WiFi card for it

Ah that brings me right back. I didn't have an iPaq but a similar clone (I think it was a Medion-branded Mitac Mio) and you had a choice. Use the SD card as storage, or use the slot with a freaky "SDIO" Wi-Fi card that stuck out the top, and denied use of the slot for an SD-card at the same time. Quite the dilemma.

I remember it being a great GPS unit for it's time.

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GreggAlan@reddit

There were SD memory cards with built in WiFi, for adding wireless data transfer to many digital cameras, but I never found out if any of those cards had SDIO access to the wireless.

When Palm was still in business, I contacted the companies making them and told them they'd have an bigger market if they could make their cards add WiFi + storage to Palm OS and other PDAs.

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babj615@reddit

I had the wi-fi cf card, and a gps cf card, even had the 1GB microdrive, but mostly used it with my Sony Ericsson T68i for internet via Bluetooth.

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BiggestNizzy@reddit

I had an xda II in 2004 and it did everything the iPhone did .

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RedditWishIHadnt@reddit

It did a lot more. The difference is that it looked like a windows 98 desktop and a lot of things needed a stylus (you could use a lot of functions without, but the buttons were really small).

The iPhone came along with an interface designed to be stabbed at with fingers. It was easier for non-IT people to navigate and pushed user friendly features like phone, camera, music etc to the forefront rather than nerdy IT stuff.

It was initially worse at everything other than user experience. For a lot of people that was the thing they cared about most.

MS tried again with the “tile” interface (windows 8) which looked more finger pokable but still harmonised across phone, tablet and PC. This didnt win over phone people and just annoyed PC people.

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BiggestNizzy@reddit

The Metro interface on windows phone absolutely nailed it, and it is still the best phone experience I have ever had. It worked reasonably well on touchscreen tablets but was utterly pointless on desktop.

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johncate73@reddit

When WP died and I had to go to Android, I purchased Square Home Launcher and still use the Windows Phone UI on Android today.

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SherbertChance8010@reddit

I loved mine. It was such a gadget!

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Albedo101@reddit

I had an entry level iPAQ back in the day. I don't think anybody really knew who the target audience for this was supposed to be. Nokia dominated the smartphone market with Communicators, and was licensing out SymbianOS. Palm held the market for affordable PDAs, although not many people actually even needed a PDA.

PocketPC seemingly aimed at those who wanted a PDA with much better screen and desktop-like apps. And that market was tiny and unsustainable.Who wouldn't want a Windows 3.1 style Excel in their pocket, eh?

BUT! There's a twist, lol.... These little things were such homebrew beasts! It was a fantastic MP3 player (pocket Winamp ftw) with swappable SD cards, it could play divx videos (re-encoded in crappiest bit rate of course), it could read e-books (in chm file format, lol) and most importantly, it was the first real handheld emulation device. The 320x240 screen was spot on. It even had a d-pad of sorts and the stylus. It had ScummVM port to play Lucasarts adventures, C64 emulator, NES emulator... all kinds of fun stuff. The only thing holding it back were then still high prices o SD cards.

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chanmancan@reddit

We sold these when I worked at CompUSA in the early 2000s. Someone had one with the wifi module and named it "iPaqAWirelessOne."

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sprashoo@reddit

I dunno, they had most of the capabilities of the iPhone on paper, but the user experience was utter shite. That was the big blind spot of Microsoft at that time, which Apple took full advantage of. They thought of personal/mobile computing as purely quantitative. Our device has a longer list of features as their device. It has bigger numbers. It is therefore equivalent or better. Anyone claiming that it has a better UX is just a mush brained artsy fartsy type. Look at our stock price! Bigger number! Better!

Then they proceeded to utterly lose the mobile market to companies who understood UX, because they weren’t propped up there by business purchasing.

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Avery_Thorn@reddit

I think the biggest issue was the success of the Palm Pilot.

It was very clearly a device that was a computer accessory that you unplugged and took with you to your meeting, with your schedule, some emails for you to refer back to, and you could take notes on it and send them to your computer. But it was very, very focused on being an extension of your desktop that you could take to a meeting with you. You didn't get emails in the meeting, if you wrote a reply it wouldn't send until you docked it.

And that was the problem with all of the early handhelds that I used / played with: they all wanted to be a desktop accessory that lived on your desk and vacationed in your pocket. All of these assumed that you would have a computer to tether it to. They were all designed as a computer accessory, not a computer of it's own right.

These little handheld computers were not treated like the computers that they obviously were, but as accessories that needed to be docked to update their data from the host computer. Everything in the interface was centered around that, and while it was possible to detether it a little bit, it made everything harder.

And the dumb thing is - if you look at the Samsung Blackjack, which was a very early Blackbery-like WinCE device, the interface was actually really good! It had a physical keyboard, which gave it a very small (NON-TOUCH) screen, but they scaled everything fairly well, and all of the navigation was done with the keyboard and arrow keys.

And then MS released the next version of WinCE. I "upgraded" to a LG Expo, the phone with the weird little pico projector grafted onto the battery cover. The interface was a complete and utter cluster. It was the worst phone I have ever owned. It was the first phone that I counted down the days until I could finally get a new one for, and I traded it out at 2 years 1 day, the length of the contract on that phone.

Even the first iPhones and the first iPad really, really wanted to be desktop accessories. Even Apple didn't realize that, and they baked a lot of silly stuff like not being able to download directly from the internet to the iPad. It was a big deal when you could finally buy a song directly from the iTunes store without plugging it into a computer. To this day, I don't think a modern iPad can go to say, BandCamp and buy music and directly add it to your library on the iPad.

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emachanz@reddit

They were way more than an iphone back in the day.

Just remember, Iphones didnt have a file explorer until a few years ago. Also, I remember you couldnt open/attach some files on emails via Iphone. The deal breaker for me was downloading and unzipping rar files, which I could do perfectly fine on my Ipaq and earlier android phone.

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howjoel@reddit

I ran a deployment of these with the big pci expansion backpack that held a Verizon cellular modem. It was possible, but it also kind of sucked.

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carcenomy@reddit

The Vodafone rep was showing off a cell modem jacket prototype during the Compaq seminar when they were introducing the iPaq locally... we all oohed and ahhed...

Then it never released 🤣

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The_Grungeican@reddit

i think that was around the time Compaq was sold to HP wasn't it?

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carcenomy@reddit

Couple of years earlier.

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TheThiefMaster@reddit

There was a version with a cell modem and it had a big stubby antenna on it. The iPAQ h6300 was the first one I think, in 2004.

But yeah without any kind of connected data access they were mostly a glorified PDA. I had two as a teen and mostly used them as an MP3 player in my car and to play games on (they were surprisingly capable).

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Professional-Web898@reddit

Yes! Want (again).

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Mallthus2@reddit

I had one of these. It was even less useful than my PalmPilot so it got put in a drawer and then donated to a thrift store sometime before I moved in 2002.

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RadishAggravating491@reddit

Compaq pocket pc! I used one for years! Syncing it was a pain but a great device!

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tempfoot@reddit

Also vote yes. I loved those things and their ilk. Had several generations of the Casio versions and as I recall the first one was greyscale screen only!

The early ones were pre-WiFi so the only way to sync, send/receive the emails from the device etc. was to sync via usb to a host computer.

I will admit that in one of my office drawers right now there is definitely a dell Axim x51v complete with sync cable, cradle, and spare batteries. It was still operational about a year ago. The only thing I lost was the cf card form factor GPS setup I had for it. Still have the CF cradle somewhere, but not the gps unit that sat in it. I was a badass with my handheld maps….and battery that lasted maybe an hour!!

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GreggAlan@reddit

Did you have the kit to connect a 640x480 VGA monitor? There was a project to port Android to the Axim, called AxDroid.

It got to a bootable point but the people doing it couldn't scrape together the $$$$$ the maker of the video chip wanted for the specifications, so video "performance" was the opposite of that.

Then along came Android 3 and ye olde Axims didn't have the storage space or CPU power for it so AxDroid was abandoned.

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tempfoot@reddit

I didn’t know either of those things existed. By the time I got mine they were being closed out. I’d been on blackberry for work since 2000 - the email pager days and Blackberry was adding functions and had had a wry basic web browser for a couple years when the axim was released so my true Pocket PC fan days were mostly behind me. It took years for me to warm up to Blackberry though because you were beholden to corporate IT for permission (and costs) to use it at the server, as opposed to just needing desktop install permission to install Microsoft software that didn’t seem controversial. I definitely warmed up to the product as it added features….like a phone. Stayed with Blackberry u til iPhone 4 because I needed things like cut/copy/paste.

Had I known back in the day that there were GA adapters I can completely see myself wasting time money and hours trying to set up something….not too practical!

Thanks for listening to my old person rambling.

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Dapper-Wait8529@reddit

Awesome device! I had a keyboard case for this. I would pop it in and take notes in class. What a time to be alive.

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AleksTrst@reddit

anything can be a computer if you make it one

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JasonMckin@reddit

An executive got an iPaq for free and didn’t need it, so she gave me hers. It was a remarkable machine. Compaq/HP had an amazing screen and Windows actually looked pretty nice on it. Microsoft just never got their mojo in mobile to get scale.

That wire at the bottom reminds me though the docking station looked like crap. Otherwise, great portable computer around the early 2000s.

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carcenomy@reddit

The expansion jackets had such amazing potential but I think lots of them ended up being vaporware - there was meant to be one that came with a headset, had a GSM radio... would've been essentially a smartphone half a decade early

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GreggAlan@reddit

Palm's first smartphone (before Apple's) ran Windows Mobile and needed a headset for the phone function. Their next phone/PDA integrated the speaker and microphone.

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carcenomy@reddit

That was the plan for the phone jacket too.

Which Palm was that? Oldest one I've seen with WinMo was the Treo 750.

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JasonMckin@reddit

There were a series of Treo’s with WinMo.

Palm was really jacked up by 2005. RIM was ripping them apart at the same time more devices were just popping up in general. Somebody very smart at Microsoft got Palm to believe they could sell more hardware but letting PalmOS die and anchoring to the WinMo ecosystem.

In the end, neither Palm nor WinMo survived.

Personally, classic Palm/Handspring and iPaq were the gems from the era. I used Blackberries but never fell in love with them like the earlier handhelds.

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GreggAlan@reddit

Dunno. It's been years. I did obtain one of the later ones that was a proper phone. Don't recall how. Never used it, just sold it to some guy for his teenage daughter who wanted a phone with a keyboard for texting. He popped his AT&T GSM SIM in it, made a call, paid (IIRC $40) and was happy. Dunno if his daughter was happy with the clunky thing.

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ZjY5MjFk@reddit

I remember it had excel. For some reason running excel blew my mind, I was like "this is a real device/os". Not that I would ever want to create excel documents on a pda with a pointing device and tiny screen, but was cool that it was that advanced.

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JasonMckin@reddit

They had the entire office suite ported as I recall. Windows Mobile honestly wasn't all that bad, they just never got hardware vendors or developers on board. It honestly looked a lot more professional than my Palm Tungsten.

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jor1965@reddit

Is your battery bulging? Have you found a way to power it without the battery inserted? I’m afraid to use mine because of a swollen battery. Replacements are nowhere to be found.

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GreggAlan@reddit

https://www.reddit.com/r/vintagecomputing/comments/1sxr3w2/comment/oisj96z/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button

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Deer-in-Motion@reddit

I found the Palm Tungsten E I used in grad school 22 years ago.

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GreggAlan@reddit

I just now reached over to my left where my LifeDrive (with 4gig CF upgrade) has been sitting on my desk for a few... years. Got it plugged in to see if the battery will still charge. My Tungsten E2 should be here somewhere.

Good news for Palm users, Dmitry Grinberg made all his Palm stuff freeware a while ago at palmpowerups.com

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JasonMckin@reddit

I don’t know why, but I have never had the same emotional connection with a smartphone that I had with my classic Palm or Palm Tungsten. The only reason I stopped using my Tungsten is when i got my first job that issued Blackberries.

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Macroexp@reddit

Nope there’s no cmos battery. Just one battery for everything. You might be able to find replacements, they weren’t hard to swap. But yes, in my opinion (and collection) they are vintage computers, just handheld.

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Parking_Constant_960@reddit (OP)

Ah okay. I consider them PDAs. Anyways thanks for the advice I’ll try finding a replacement or I may need to get someone to recell the battery

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The_Grungeican@reddit

i mean, they are, but they're Pocket PCs. says so right on the front.

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daveminter@reddit

Pocket PC was the later/alternative name for the OS (Win CE).

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The_Grungeican@reddit

yeah. it was a bit of a joke.

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daveminter@reddit

Fair enough, but it was genuinely confusing. Even now I'm not really sure where or what the boundaries between WinCE and PocketPC were supposed to be.

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GreggAlan@reddit

Windows CE was originally for Pocket PCs. Tiny laptops smaller than Toshiba Librettos. The OS was soon renamed PocketPC, and Windows Mobile for PDAs and cellphones.

Windows CE lived on as an embedded OS for things like price scanners directly connected to inventory systems, various other medical and industrial devices, and a huge variety of GPS navigation receivers. In those uses, the real WinCE GUI was hidden behind a single purpose app that took over the whole screen. With some of them (particularly GPC receivers) it's possible to break out of the default app and get at the underpinnings of the system, though they're usually very stripped down so there's not a lot that can be done. For GPS there have been some 3rd party menus that can be run instead of the GPS app, which can also launch the GPS app. For some WinCE GPS receivers the "jailbreak" is as simple as going into settings and selecting a different Navigation app. It does not care what the app actually is. That enables things like running a completely different navigation app like iGO.

What I've yet to find is a way to get a full version of WinCE 5.x installed on any GPS. Even if one could, there's no way to connect a keyboard so all interaction would have to be with a stylus and on-screen keyboard, unless there's something like Graffiti for WinCE.

I got the "pro" version of Graffiti for Android on some free promotional deal. Installed it, tried it just for nostalgia. "Ha! I still know all the strokes!" Haven't used it again. It doesn't work so well with a finger, a pen-point stylus would be needed.

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The_Grungeican@reddit

reading through some of the other posts, it looks like it was sort of easy to port some things from other versions of Windows to Windows CE. a little more stripped down, but still somewhat functional in that regard.

i'm not a programmer so i wouldn't know. to me Windows CE seemed a bit like a stepping stone to what later became their Windows Phone stuff.

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GreggAlan@reddit

The battery will be a Lithium-Ion-Polymer pouch or thin "prismatic" style. Prismatic just means the package has square edges. The thing to watch out for is not getting a new old stock one that's as old as that iPaq, and totally dead or at least below the safe minimum voltage.

I should get out my LifeDrive (with 4gig CF card replacing the MicroDrive) and Tungsten E2 and see if they'll still charge up.

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Macroexp@reddit

Well, I wrote a lot of software for them, and while they came with PDA software, they were capable of quite a lot for the time.

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abc_harold@reddit

I'd be interested if anyone manages to find a replacement, I looked a few years ago and couldn't. It's a bit of a paperweight with a dead battery!

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maokaby@reddit

I didn't manage to find replacement batteries for my HPs. Perhaps the only way - basic battery of similar size, rip off original battery pcb, and solder it to a new one.

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Killertigger@reddit

Well, it had a processor, and technically ran a flavor of Windows, and was often referred to as a ‘handheld computer’ - so on a technicality, it should be considered a computer.

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babj615@reddit

I miss my iPaq 😔

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Due_Program_321@reddit

I loved my Compaq iPaq

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michaelnz29@reddit

I had a couple of these devices and really ‘enjoyed’ it compared to what else was available at the time, Blackberry just looked amateur.

I purchased the TomTom GPS software and hardware and it was awesome (at the time).

But eventually I had to go to Blackberry (yuck) and then the iPhone came along and I haven’t looked back - til your post today :)

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6gv5@reddit

$5... I recall when it would cost half a month pay to buy one, but luckily I could use the ones we had at work. We used to install Familiar linux on them to develop various "apps" on them when neither smartphones nor the word "app" existed. Good old times.

I had to admit however that as someone who still likes a real keyboard over a touch screen any day, if I had the money I'd have bought the Psion Series 5 which back then was simply the sexiest thing around.

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daveminter@reddit

I'm sure it counts as vintage as I was doing dev work on them in the early 2000s. They ran WinCE (perfectly named IMO) which was fairly horrible and most of the SDK docs were lifted from the Win9x docs and were very inaccurate.

I don't recall much about the hardware, but the battery life was pretty low in use, so you could get a sort of battery-case for it to give it a bit more oomph. Maybe try to find one of them?

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DumbNTough@reddit

They ran WinCE (perfectly named IMO)

+1

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chronos7000@reddit

CE+ME+NT...

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flecom@reddit

so you could get a sort of battery-case

They were called paqs iirc, I had the pcmcia paq with the extended battery and a sierra aircard for blazing fast 128k edge cellular data... Good times

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Hjalfi@reddit

Backpaqs? Baqpaqs? Something like that. Where I was working at the time we had an iPaq with one on my desk as an ARM build server --- it had a 1GB PCMCIA spinning disk as storage (very thin, very fragile, very broken after about six months) and an NE2000 card for networking. It was ludicrous, but did work.

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ZjY5MjFk@reddit

There used to be a project to get linux running on some of these devices. It was half-compete, but booted and think it even gave you X11 desktop. I ran it briefly and had some functionality, but was fairly bare bones.

Then these iPaqs drop out of popularity for favor of newer devices, so don't think anyone has really worked on the project. But might be worth a google search.

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Cross_22@reddit

I wrote a GPS-like app for Windows CE / Mobile and it wasn't that bad IMO. Porting was fairly straight forward exempt for a handful of missing APIs.

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Life-Breadfruit-3986@reddit

Do you know where one could likely find apis and libraries for making apps on that os?

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codeasm@reddit

Windows CE 2.0 maybe? That's old, wow . https://github.com/WindowsNT351/CE-Collections but maybe use this for names to google and downlaod elsewhere. Archive.org or https://forum.winworldpc.com/discussion/15107/where-can-i-download-a-copy-of-windows-ce (its basicly a great site for anything but ce, but i respect them alott)

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codeasm@reddit

Windows ce 5.0 is still up on the microsoft site btw. Its from after 2000 tho

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daveminter@reddit

I think we were on one of the earliest models, so perhaps that was a factor? It's been... a while... though.

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bebizzy@reddit

I get PTSD just seeing that thing! I had that and one of the 2000s tablet PCs at the same time. Cutting edge stuff, but boy were they buggy.

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Pyrofer@reddit

I recently got and restored one of these. So. The battery is easily replaceable. There are like 4 screws to pop open the case and the battery is the first thing you will see, carefully unplug it from the main board.

You will need to make a note of the battery size and numbers, I am pretty sure THIS is the one I ordered, but DO CHECK.

https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005004345619614.html

You will need to remove the BMS board so you have a bare tabbed battery (or buy a tab only pouch in the first place) and remove the BMS from the old battery (making note of +/- ) and solder the iPaq BMS onto the new cell (carefully! The right way around). Then just plug it back in and re-assemble.

I don't think it has a backup battery at all, it shuts off and uses the dregs from the main battery when low to keep the RAM. If it goes flat on the main battery, ALL installed data is lost and it's back to factory.

I think that model has an "IPAQ File Store" partition which is kept on ROM for important data?

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PatrioticPariah@reddit

I always wanted a Axim X51v, like ridiculously. Love pocket PCs but mine were stolen from I assume BIL when I moved.

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chandleya@reddit

It says compaq on it. Almost a guarantee.

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dnabre@reddit

Vintage can be somewhat relative. I think every mac I own, save one, is newer than this, and most of those definitely vintage.

Think I got an device like this buried in a bin somewhere. If you open it up, and track down the battery, charge, and power circuits, you could definitely work something out. Assuming the battery is replaceable, finding something compatible might be possible.

For a lot of my old machines, where the firmware/BIOS/etc will allow it, I have just removed the CMOS battery entirely, and have a script run to set the time and then reboot into normal OS.

I have one machine (386 laptop) that uses a BIOS config program. These were a thing at one point, save the costly on-board memory you'd use for an interface, and have a DOS program provide it. So I have a disk I use when powering it on, that will boot, run a tweaked version of that program to change BIOS settings and set the clock.

Do people have interest in playing around with these type of device? I should dig out that old one I have, and make sure it goes to someone who'd like to play with it.

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ChatBot42@reddit

Hey! I helped make that! I ran the Pocket PC/Pocket PC Phone/Windows Mobile SDK team for several years.

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seteguk@reddit

For a "road warrior" experience, try connecting your HP iPAQ Pocket PC to the internet via GPRS using an Infrared (IrDA) link with a compatible phone.

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TechDocN@reddit

In my reckoning, this is more retro than vintage, but it definitely still counts as an interesting piece of computing history. I have a small handheld collection that goes back to the 1980s.

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Lonely-Artist5371@reddit

Anyone here running pci with pcie adapter ? I wanna see some p2 or p1 bottleneck builds lol 😆

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nonaveris@reddit

Nice find!

I have its predecessor the Compaq h3650, which on top of WinCE, also ran Linux (Familiar/Intimate) courtesy of handhelds.org (long gone but archived).

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saraseitor@reddit

yes absolutely! I have a tiny collection of PocketPC and Palm devices too!

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Life_Conversation666@reddit

I still have the software for these devices, and it's in a format that allows you to use it directly from the memory card without syncing it with a computer. Specifically, there's a backup system for backing up system settings and restoring them in a couple of clicks after resuming work on an empty device. Every couple of years, I turn on my device from this series, restore the previous system settings, and use it until I get tired of it again.

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LevTheBarnacle@reddit

Old handhelds is more dedicated subreddit for this devices. It looks like windows mobile 5 ppc I have hp ipaq travel companion pretty useless device by to day standards it has WiFi but I can't connect to modern router unless you remove password requirements.if your device has Bluetooth you can turn on Bluetooth tethering on your phone/tablet it's high enough speed for those old devices. Regards the date didn't have internal battery so if it dies it looses power date and time not saved file don't know how dedicated you are I have seen pictures ppl who rebuild and retrofit different batteries to fit in in onether devices there is several archives with games and all kinds of programs ,if your device has CF slot you can throw in extra memory or find scanner and use it as barcode scanner I'm using mine to play Old vintage games.

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magitoddw@reddit

it’s 20 years old. For comparison, I bought my first classic mac in 2000 and it was from 90, only 10 years at that time. So this counts.

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AgentOrange96@reddit

I think you could argue it's a vintage computer. But also what's great about this subreddit is it's full of nerds who will appreciate this anyway rather than elitists who will eat you alive because technically whatever may not be a vintage computer even if it's in the spirit of it. XD

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spektro123@reddit

I’ve got a similar one 😄 My father bought it to use it as a car navigation system.
https://imgur.com/a/cqCLAhy

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flipadoodlely@reddit

The iPAQ is one of the few things in my collection that I got rid of over a decade ago, because this thing was junk. Absolutely ruined by that terrible operating system and the fact you had to use ActiveSync daily from Windows to make it useful. I did have a PCMCIA WiFi card but that barely worked either.

It could have been incredible with a more stable OS and a cell modem.

I wouldn't personally call this vintage, but that's my opinion.

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plathrop01@reddit

I'd say absolutely. Had one while working at a help desk and used it for supporting only about 20 people who had Pocket PC devices.

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gfkxchy@reddit

I had one! Only for a few days before I returned it.

I thought it would be life-changing. I could load it up with my emails and calendar and work on them on the go and sync up later. I could throw some music on it and be able to play it back using an aux cable in my car or with headphones. I could view documents on the go as a reference and keep a few pictures on it for viewing as well.

I recall being able to fit two MP3s on it, (specifically, two short 128kbps songs) and it broke my calendar (synchronized its empty calendar overtop mine) and didn't work well with my email app (I could see messages but not reply, then sync to have the replies sent).

It wasn't until OTA sync and better storage density came along that handhelds got good (Blackberry).

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MemLeakRaceCond@reddit

I was running marketing for RealNetworks' mobile group when this came out. We "got the Shrek trailer to run on this device, and at the time, it was incredibly cool to be watching a reasonably high-quality animation trailer on a handheld.

I had a device and took it with me everywhere to show the Shrek trailer. That was it. Battery life sucked, so I had that enormous battery pack with it. We used to joke that while it technically could fit in your back pocket, you'd need a sturdy belt to keep your pants up if you tried to carry it there.

All the content had to be "side-loaded" - loaded from your PC with a cable. Over-the-air content literally did not exist back then.

And every piece of content had to be tweaked to run on the device.

So this was the epitome of WinCE - cool demo, zero practicality. It lived and died with the Shrek trailer.

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donith913@reddit

Oh man, I know there are mixed feelings these days but I loved the Pocket PC days. I had a very similar iPaq of this era. They were shockingly capable. Microsoft ported Age of Empires (the first one) to the platform! It shipped on an SD card. I ran Windows Mobile until I basically couldn’t get a decent cell phone that ran it. When my HTC Touch died I was heartbroken. I loved that phone.

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emachanz@reddit

I had two of those Ipaqs pocket PCs and I used them up to 2011 when I bought a galaxy S1 android phone.

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BunchaPepperFcks@reddit

That's vintage as heck

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GeordieAl@reddit

I’d say yes, it does count as a vintage computer. Ok, it doesn’t have the form factor of what most people see as a vintage computer - a keyboard attached to a display, or keyboard attached to a box attached to a display. But really, computer form factors constantly change. Colossus, ENIAC, Manchester Baby, CADET, Altair, PET, ZX81… all vintage computers, but all very different in form, design, and operation.

Everyone will have their own idea of what a vintage computer is, or what era means the most to them.

For me, it’s 1977 to around 1996. Introduction of the Commodore PET(Apple II and TRS 80) to the end of the Commodore Amiga/Atari ST, Acorn Archimedes, with a few exceptions. After that period computers became more commodities, the same systems, just updated with new specs, more evolution than revolution.

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desmond_koh@reddit

That looks like Windows Mobile 2003 while notoriously lost all memory and configuration when the battery died.

Windows Mobile 5 (Magneto) fixed that issue and brought push email when used with Exchange Server.

For a while there, Windows dominated the burgeoning mobility market.

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stromm@reddit

Technically, yes.

Categorically, no.

It's a PDA, not a computer.

But it does count as vintage computing and hardware, which fits here in the group.

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LXChitlin@reddit

I was tech support at a big bank HQ in the late 90’s.

These Ipaq’s were given to the top executives and were impressive kit at the time. Within the first week I can remember two coming back as they had drew on the screen with a pen rather than the stylus. Also top marks to the exec who managed to jam the stylus in backwards all the way in.

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Fragholio@reddit

Oh damn, I remember picking these out for my admins, complete with folding keyboards and the big-ass 802.11b wifi cards...had them set up to do a few tasks remotely and type stuff with difficulty, and then phones got better and better and these went the way of the forgotten pretty quickly. Good idea, bad timing and incomplete feature set though.

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Away-Squirrel2881@reddit

You might be surprised at how much people will bid for those on eBay

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Mynameismikek@reddit

At one time you could buy the entire engineering team on eBay....

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Parking_Constant_960@reddit (OP)

Really? I have 3 “pocket PCs” (I have been convinced it is a pc but smol now), this guy, a older version of this PDA that’s older and identical looking (its screen is mashed) and a Oxygen (O1) Windows Mobile “phone” (yeah naming was great back then…) that is much smaller and replacement battery=nonexistent for that one… ah shoot.

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Zen-Ism99@reddit

I’ll accept it…

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Spirited_Voice_7191@reddit

I worked at Compaq when those first came out. Well before then there were 2 memos declaring i[something] and [something]paq names forbidden. Essentially saying we were above the trendy naming conventions.

When the iPaq was announced we tried to find if that was just an excuse to reserve the namespace or someone pushed and got the rules exception. We couldn't make headway.

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Materidan@reddit

Yeah, I got one of these. Bad battery too, but works plugged in. Volatile memory, but all my old Windows CE. games on the SD are still there!

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TheOGTachyon@reddit

I guess the real question is,
"Is a PDA a computer?"

My vote is yes. That said these are also, IMO, just on the inside cusp of being vintage age/era wise. Eg I personally don't consider a Pentium running XP "vintage", just an old computer. But that's me.

These were solid little devices that suffered from being both ahead of and behind the time. Too late to compete with the simple, functional elegance of the Palm Pilot, too early to have a solid, lean, dedicated OS and infrastructure to be part of the smartphone era. Microsoft's stubborn insistence on creating the Windows everywhere era hurt them and consumers for years. These are from the graveyard of that era.

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songoffall@reddit

It does count, but it's not really a PC, as it is not IBM PC compatible.

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This-Requirement6918@reddit

r/oldhandhelds or r/retrohandhelds is the subs you're looking for but a lot of us are on those too.

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Spare-Good-5372@reddit

Hell yeah it does. I had one back in the day.

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This-Requirement6918@reddit

r/vintagehandhelds is the sub you're looking for.

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Foreign-Attorney-147@reddit

It's been a very long time since I last used one of those, but the batteries just slide out very easily. It wouldn't surprise me if Batteries Plus carries a suitable replacement. They were rectangular if I remember right, with metal contacts at the top.